Software called ArisID should allow developers to write protocol-independent applications that automatically incorporate identity management standards. The overall goal is to protect user data in a dependable and secure manner.

OpenLiberty.org was founded as an open collaborative in January 2007 for designing platform-independent products and services for identify management. Financing for the project was largely provided by the Liberty Alliance, with members including Sun, Novell, HP, Oracle, NEC and Intel. "From the user perspective as well as that of the deploying organization, it’s an issue of who is trusted with what," according to the Alliance mission statement. With the new ArisID development software, the Alliance wants to provide programmers a tool with which they can build identity management standards right into their applications.

ArisID gets its name from ProjectAris, as in Aristotle. Its goal is to develop a common API for existing identity management technologies. A significant part of the work involves CARML (Client Attribute Requirements Markup Language), a proposed common language base for that purpose. The project promises for its first release that developers can rely on SQL databases and LDAP libraries for help. They hope then to extend functionality to Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), Liberty Identity Web Services (ID-WSF), OpenID and the OASIS WS-Trust standard. The second core aspect of the ArisID API are the WS-Policy Privacy Constraints, Identity Governance Framework (IGF) standards defined by the Liberty Alliance in June 2008.

The standards are "atomic constraints on the use, display, retention, storage and propagation of identity data" and ensure that the identity management method used is truly relevant for the application.

Aristotle project leader and Oracle collaborator Phil Hunt will present ArisID in a comprehensive webcast on Thursday, December 11 at 8:00 AM Pacific time. Interested participants can register for the one-hour webcast here.

Today BMC Software, Eucalyptus Systems, HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat and SUSE announced the formation of the Open Virtualization Alliance. The announcement says that the consortium will "promote examples of customer successes, encourage interoperability and accelerate the expansion of the ecosystem of third-party solutions around KVM, providing businesses improved choice, performance and price for virtualization."

MySQL founder Monty Widenius and the Finnish MySQL services and support company Percona have joined forces to create the Open Database Alliance. The intention of the new consortium is to protect the open source status of essential MySQL components.